Books

Tulsa

“This is not a picture book that will lie quietly and without protest on coffee tables. Nor is this book easy to pick up, confront, challenge. For this is a collection of photographs that assail, lacerate, devastate. And ultimately indict. These are pictures that shimmer with a ferocious honesty.” –Dick Cheverton, The Detroit Free Press

About The Book

When it first appeared in 1971, Larry Clark’s groundbreaking book Tulsa sparked immediate controversy across the nation. Its graphic depictions of sex, violence, and drug abuse in the youth culture of Oklahoma were acclaimed by critics for stripping bare the myth that Middle America had been immune to the social convulsions that rocked America in the 1960s. The raw, haunting images taken in 1963, 1968, and 1971 document a youth culture progressively overwhelmed by self-destruction and are as moving and disturbing today as when they first appeared.

Praise

“A searing glimpse into an underclass world of drugs, guns, and sexual abuse . . . . A harrowing, vivid, and unforgettable document.” –Andy Grundberg, The New York Times

“Staggering, poignant, raw, compassionate, and utterly honest. . . . Tulsa is a major work, almost too good . . . to be true. . . . It is an intense, visceral, wrenching statement.” –A. D. Coleman, The Village Voice

“This is not a picture book that will lie quietly and without protest on coffee tables. Nor is this book easy to pick up, confront, challenge. For this is a collection of photographs that assail, lacerate, devastate. And ultimately indict. These are pictures that shimmer with a ferocious honesty.” –Dick Cheverton, The Detroit Free Press

“Tulsa dropped from the sky into the heart of the photography world, and it remains one of the most influential portfolios of the last 30 years. . .. Indeed, no one had ever seen anything quite like it: It was explicit, but too elegant and alluring to be dismissed as mere shock propaganda; it had a verite feel, but since Clark himself was obviously a player in the misadventures he portrayed, it couldn’t be seen as a straight documentary; it was hardcore, but too trusting of the power of photography to capture obsession to be rejected as cynical or exploitative. . . . Clark is a complicated man, an his pictures can be tough to look at, but something of [his] innocence comes through the darkness of the book, and the paradox it creates is the primary source of the photograph’s power.” –Jim Lewis, Harper’s Bazaar

“There’s plenty of sex, death, violence, anxiety, boredom, anticipation, fear, joy, anger, resignation, and most of the other significant shadings of life, but the heart of Clark’s work is romance, pure and not so simple. . . . In dwelling almost obsessively on the stark exaggerations of the lives of speed freaks, Clark is not asking us to believe that these were poor, misunderstood kids, messing up their heads and bodies because society left them no alternative . . . but only to see them as he did, through the eyes of an artist.” –Owen Edwards, American Photographer

“[An] unflinching depiction of youth crime and drug abuse. . . . [Tulsa] is really a movie told through the power of the still image–a form that invites queasy observation of horrors like Clark’s pregnant friend injecting herself with narcotics.” –Photo District News